TJARK IHMELS
June 12, 2026 – July 18, 2026
TODAY WE SPEAK HOLY
Galerie Greulich
Starting today, we speak with reverence. — Tjark Ihmels presents his new solo exhibition at the
Greulich Gallery in Frankfurt from June 13 to July 18, 2026; the opening will take place on June 12 as part of the “
” vernissage tour organized by GalerienFrankfurtMitte.
The title sounds like a proclamation, and yes, there is an underlying irony here—a nod to the cult of genius that has clung to art like a second skin since
the Romantic era. But Ihmels means more than that, and he
is serious: the sacred as that which eludes grasp, the transcendent in
the everyday, the realization that every day may be declared sacred, precisely because life
is sacred.
Who am I, really? How do I see myself, and how do others see me? What image do I project,
and what image do I want to live up to? These are the questions that have preoccupied Tjark Ihmels in his painting
for years, consistently, without him ever answering them. The human
figure is his medium: a form that questions itself, in a state of suspension, in flux, impossible to
truly pin down anywhere. In the new paintings, the space around the figures dissolves into painterly
surfaces; background and figure merge, and one wonders where one ends and
the other begins. Water is introduced as a reflection and duplication. The surface
as a place where one’s own image is always also another. Ihmels
leaves these self-questionings hanging in the room, because painting poses them but need not explain or clarify them.
New to this group of works are small glimpses of landscape and city: hills, houses,
hints of Mediterranean places, perhaps Tuscany. Longing and melancholy are evoked here
in equal measure. They do not form a narrative; they are simply there, like memories,
that one cannot quite grasp. This, too, is a form of the sacred: something one is allowed to see,
but cannot hold onto, let alone truly comprehend. Ihmels, born in Leipzig in 1963, a master student of Prof. Arno Rink at the HGB Leipzig, knows both sides of the picture: He has received international recognition as a media artist—
, the City of Munich Media Art Prize, and an Honorable Mention at Ars Electronica—and teaches at the
Mainz University of Applied Sciences in the Department of Time-Based Media. The decision to return to painting was also a
decision in favor of slowness: not as a stance against the digital, but as a condition
for an image to truly breathe. In the digital age, which has trained us to consume and swipe past images in seconds
, Ihmels paints pictures that make you stop. That trigger something within you
without you immediately knowing what. Ihmels himself calls this the pull—and the pull is
the actual goal.
Die Galerie has been exhibiting Tjark Ihmels in Frankfurt since 2009. What becomes apparent during this time is
not restlessness, but a consistent deepening: the same fundamental questions, constantly reexamined,
always framed differently. Starting today, we speak sacredly. sheds new light on Ihmels’ central artistic
questions. Anyone who has ever stood before these paintings knows why one
returns and why painting, even in the year 2026, is far from dead.
Galerie Greulich
Fahrgasse 22
60311 Frankfurt am Main
T. +49 69 680 961 29 I +49 172 102 50 73
E. info@galerie-greulich.de